Eight Inches Apart
by Xyliette
Summary: Set future. Addison loses the boyfriend, gets the baby, and somehow winds up right back where she began- with Derek in her bed. An unusual and borderline depressing take on the same old cliché. Derek/Addison.


A/N: The kind of angst that punches you in the teeth. Enjoy-

**_~-~-~-~-~-~  
Eight Inches Apart  
- Red Host  
~-~-~-~-~-~_**

She knew, had known for weeks, well aware before that stupid stick changed form and announced that the impossible was very much happening within.

He never knew, wasn't once in with the in crowd on the fact that he was going to be a father and that the one thing his short time girlfriend had wanted since moving to California was something that he had unwittingly been able to give her.

He would never get to understand the gravity of the situation and she would never be able to live it down.

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

"Thanks for coming," Naomi pauses, sticking the shiny key into Addison's house door and turning it. "She's just...she's not herself."

Derek nods and Richard pats his back hesitantly. No one ever said it was going to be an enjoyable trip in the sun with beach bags and greasy skin saving lotion.

"Addison! Addie! I'm here!" Naomi yells in the general direction of the stairs. "She was...fine, before," Naomi explains to them, toeing out of her shoes and looking at them expectantly. "She was coming in to work and she was trying, at least and now, now she just lays in bed all day."

"How long-"

"Almost two weeks," Naomi interjects, rolling her eyes when Derek starts in about calling them sooner than this. She thought she had it handled. She thought Addison was under control.

"Derek," Richard clears his throat, "let's stay focused, okay? We still have to go to-"

"I know Richard," Derek sighs. They still have to go to the ridiculous conference in the morning but suddenly he can't think of anything but Addison lying amongst a throng of pillows, hair mussed, face splotchy and dried out, a wide expanse of used tissues covering the bedding. The problem here was that he was thinking of her as his Addison, and worrying about her as though they still were connected.

Naomi grazes the white door with her hand. Not being latched, she merely pushes back to reveal the pleasure of the day. "Hey Addie, Derek and Richard are here to see you."

Derek presses himself forward, without premeditation, and slides onto the paperless bed. She's not crying and there have been no signs of any movement recently. Fresh white sheets, tucked in on the corners per her obsessive compulsive disorder and cold nighttime feet, pillows without any indentations or indications of sleep, her hands resting on top of her stomach – not wrung together, or clenched white at the knuckles – just resting. She's resting. She'd look almost peaceful if it wasn't for the wild sense of fear in her eyes.

"Long time no see," Derek jokes. He saw her last month, when she came up for work, when Richard tried to dangle another position over her head.

"She doesn't talk much," Naomi warns and then follows Richard outside of the room when the air becomes noticeably tense; when it becomes apparent that they are no longer wanted eavesdroppers.

"Addison?" Derek questions, attempting, in vain, to find her line of sight or pick out what she is staring at on the yellow striped walls. There's nothing discernible, nothing obvious. "Hey Addie?"

He understands and can reason with a situation that puts you so beside yourself that basic replies seem foolish and unwarranted. He empathizes with wanting to be left alone to wallow. But there has always been something inside of his soul that is never okay with watching her hurt (and when he was the cause, he just picked up shop and ran to whatever surgery was available). So, quite daringly given her evidential fragile state, he scoots forward and wraps two warm arms around her shoulders, nuzzling his head to her neck, releasing somehow more of his own pain than easing hers.

"You don't have to talk," he whispers softly, letting the words dance over the ridge of her ear. "But if you want to, if there's anything that needs to be said...I'm here. It's just me Addie."

At some point, near when the sun begins to lose itself over the horizon, he can hear Mark's voice downstairs demanding that he be able to interrupt and barge in. But for whatever reason they are afforded more minutes, more time with her in his safe embrace, soft and light – weighted only with the sorrow of a midnight call and a wonderful secret.

When it's good and dark, when the world outside matches her heart within, she speaks.

"I'm having a baby."

Behind the banner of avoidance and over the bypasses of denial Derek waits and the end result is the same as it ever would have been with someone beside himself as the father. "Congratulations."

The knock on the wall in the hallway saves them both and introduces itself in the form of Chinese takeout which, to his great surprise, she eats. With her chopsticks poised and disciplined, hands steady and unwavering in the soft yellow spark the lamp in the corner casts over the room, she dines. Mark joins Derek on the bed making himself at home by her feet.

If transported back in time, the moment would be the same. Richard nearby and ruling the terrain (with Naomi somewhere), Derek closer to Addison than any friend should be, Mark hogging the horizontal strip at the end, familiar food shared amongst bored interns and then turned residents. But it's nothing similar or recognizable. No laughs, insinuations, jokes, lewd comments, or concealed kisses this go around.

Just an aching silence and the realization that sometimes there really isn't anything that can be done; nothing corrective or comforting to say to the one who just got dropped another bowling ball into her suitcase of baggage.

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

"Addison, you could come back...if you wanted to. You can stay with me," Derek offers, jamming his hands into his pockets, watching the form he has come to know well within the last few days.

"You live with Meredith," Mark reminds him and he'd swear in that moment she grimaces. "You can come back with me-"

"You have an intern in your bed every night!" Derek yells.

"Well, she could stay at the trailer," Mark supplies, running out of ideas, willing to forgo Lexie for Addison; always willing to drop everyone in her name.

"With Richard," Derek agrees, mulling it over. "She hates the trailer."

"Maybe she just hated it with you in it," Mark snorts.

"You have no right-"

"Okay, and we're stopping," Naomi speaks loudly, making herself known for the first time all afternoon. "Listen, this is where she wants to be. She is fine here-"

"She is not fine," Mark retorts. Never in his days has he seen Addison so...still and quiet, too overcome with the suffocation to do anything; to remedy the noose tightening around her neck.

"Clearly," Derek adds, pointing at her five feet away.

"Sam is next door and I can come stay for a while, make sure things are...non-volatile."

They're all waiting for the explosion; they'll never see the implosion coming.

"We aren't leaving," Derek insists, taking a place on the lounge chair a outside the circle of the conversation.

Mark drops his head and looks toward the unusually placid ocean. "We can't stay."

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

Her stomach sprouted slowly, refusing to participate for nearly six months, denying her viable proof of anything. The depression wilted and rotted at a worse pace leaving most days nothing more than a speechless shell of want and loss. She managed.

Everyone says her daughter is the spitting image of her, a tiny clone without teeth and who makes her presence known at least seven times a night. An infant who she believes just senses that something isn't aligned in her home; that something is missing and that somehow the wretched wails that bounce off of various walls might bring it back safely.

Someday Addison will get to explain the missing puzzle piece; she'll weave a gentle tale of greatness, pride, and modern day law enforcement.

They all tell her that Aurelia is chip off the old block. All she can see is her past. Her memories wound into the tiny being's rounded fingertips and daintily curved lips. Her evenings of staying in with movies, her afternoons of sandwiches on park benches, her early mornings of shared coffee and feet in laps.

She wishes it never happened, the reminder. She wishes she didn't want that, the freedom.

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

He comes back because he has no reason to stay elsewhere, because he felt alone in the starless encounters.

Derek bounces the three week old baby in his arms and relishes in her warmth when he presses her to his chest. It's renewing, fascinating, this creature that he's never met before. "She's...amazing Addison."

He beams with a father-like joy. It's inescapable; it can't not be seen. "She's a handful."

"You're just tired," Derek admonishes. "You could...sleep if you wanted. I can watch her. Tell her tales of your wild ways as bedtime stories."

Addison bites her lip, contemplating taking him up on the offer, not to sleep but to dash into the kitchen and grab her car keys to disappear along the streets of Los Angeles.

She doesn't know if she would come back, given the opportunity.

He notes the stumble and smiles easily, enjoying the way Aurelia feels, the way her weight seems to wake him up and make him so much more aware of the life he was muddling through. It's all crystal clear with her. Everything he's ever wanted clothed in a thin onesie and swaddled with a butter soft yellow blanket. "If you need to feed her-"

"Bottles," Addison blurts out suddenly and then shakes her head. "She's...on formula."

"Oh," Derek remarks. He's disappointed in some fashion, for a reason out of their grasp. Maybe because this wasn't the fairytale he envisioned all those years ago.

"Zoloft," Addison elaborates in a low voice, nearly afraid of the scrutiny of her own child.

"It helps," Derek states, voice perking up in the end to indicate a question.

"Not yet."

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

He's a lost object, drifted in from the sea. The love never ceased but the definition, it's direct impact on the important things in life, changed. Kevin once accused her of not being over him. She never replied. She'd never move on from Derek. She'd move away, but they still circled the same track, sometimes paths temporarily aligning, providing for an interesting split from the norm.

The mangled tracks finally ceased a month ago, they joined and adhered. Derek's suitcases found permanent residence in her closet, his razor found a place in the bathroom. It was unavoidable, the reunion.

He's a doting daddy, resident fix-it man, and still habitually late to everything.

She's a resigned mother, still waiting and hoping, wanting to see it all turn out differently this time.

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**

He never saw the destruction, never saw the helpless left in its wake. He figured it happened somewhere in the time he was gone, at a point during those few months where his mind thought of nothing but her sadistic little smirk as she revealed the four words he always wanted to hear.

She never let the situation out of her hands, the collapse painfully defined and calculated. The future not malleable; predestined from the first time she told him her undoing – I love you too.

They were all waiting for the explosion; they never saw the implosion coming.

**_~-~-~-~-~-~_**


End file.
